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There's a line in Andy Grove's High Output Management that most people gloss over.

It isn’t the stuff about one-on-ones or meeting cadences.

It's a simple equation — almost embarrassingly simple — that reframes what it actually means to lead a CS organization.

Here’s the math:

Manager's Output = Output of their organization + Output of adjacent organizations they influence

Read it again.

That second term changes everything.

Let's talk about the first term.

First, we need to talk about your own team. What does your CS organization actually output?

Not activities. Not inputs. Outputs.

There's a massive difference.

Emails sent. QBRs held. Health scores updated. Calls logged.

Those are inputs. They're the work you do, hoping to produce outputs. Outputs are what happen in your customers' businesses because of your team.

Revenue retained. Time-to-value shortened. Business outcomes achieved. Expansion earned.

A couple of years ago, I was reviewing a CS team's performance with an executive team. We looked at slide after slide of activity metrics. Number of customer touchpoints. Impressive-looking graphs trending up and to the right.

One executive member finally asked a brutal question.

"But what happened to the customers?"

Silence.

If you can't draw a clean line from your team's work to measurable customer outcomes, you don't have a CS strategy. You have a CS activity log. Get that right before anything else.

Now, the second term. This is where it gets interesting.

Look at the adjacent organizations you influence.

For an Executive, this is enormous — and almost entirely untapped. Even more so for a customer leader.

Think about what actually shapes your customers' experience.

The product your engineers build (or don't). The commitments your sales team makes on the way in. The support experience when things go sideways. The marketing content that sets expectations before a customer ever logs in for the first time.

You don't control any of those functions.

But you influence all of them. And according to Grove, their collective output is part of yours.

The best CCOs I've seen treat customer intelligence like organizational infrastructure.

It used to be that this kind of influence required being in the room. You'd physically show up to product roadmap discussions, hand-carry customer data to sales, walk support leaders through patterns you spotted in your QBRs. It worked — but it didn't scale, and it depended entirely on your calendar.

That's changing.

The CCOs pulling ahead today aren't just sitting in more meetings — they're using AI to systematically surface customer intelligence to every team that needs it. Product gets a structured feed of what customers are actually asking for, not just escalations. Sales gets real data on what "great fit" looks like 18 months post-close, before they sign the wrong accounts. Support leaders see systemic patterns flagged before they compound into a churn quarter nobody saw coming.

The insight doesn't travel by meeting anymore. It travels by system.

They understand that their real leverage isn't in their headcount. It's in their ability to shape how the entire company shows up for customers.

And most CCOs leave this almost completely on the table.

Grove's formula doesn't say you should abandon your org. It says your output is bigger than your org — if you treat it that way.

Most CCOs are running hard on term one. Managing their team, hitting retention targets, handling escalations. That's the job, and it's a real one.

But term two compounds. A product decision made with better customer data pays dividends for years. A sales team that understands fit signs better accounts. Support patterns caught early don't become churn quarters.

The question isn't whether to swap your time allocation. It's whether you have a system for term two — or whether customer intelligence dies inside your org because you're too buried in term one to push it out.

That's the leverage most CCOs aren't capturing.

So ask yourself this week…

What percentage of your time are you spending genuinely influencing adjacent organizations versus managing the activity of your own team?

Be honest. The number might surprise you.

Hit "Reply" and tell me what you find.

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